Why Israel?

Why not focus on Sudan or Somalia or Syria? Here’s why.

With permission from CapitolHillCitizen.com

A friend posed a question — why so much focus on Israel when there are so many pressing crises around the world, like the Sudan, largely forgotten?

A worthy question, as dire straits expand from deadly political conflicts and authoritarian, corrupt governments to include climate impacts and crop failures.

Attention should be paid.

While US policies and actions have played undeniable roles in some disasters, like Libya and Somalia, Israel’s long occupation and brutal subjugation of Palestinians stands apart.

Here’s why.

No other country enjoys but a fraction of US patronage that Israel does. Yet it repays America by undermining our government and political processes. Could any other country get away with its lobbyists announcing a hundred million dollars and more to defeat critics in Congress — even offering $20 million to primary one and seeking, with alarming success, to nullify Americans’ 1st Amendment freedoms?

The latter is done with compliant federal and state legislators seeking to twist language and devise laws as draconian as they can get away with.

Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) got that rolling. In 2017 he tried to pass fines up to a million dollars and prison sentences up to twenty years for advocating Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Attempting to crush Americans exercising their First Amendment, at the behest of a foreign power, is a stark betrayal. Censure? Expulsion? Senator Chuck Schumer made Cardin chair of Foreign Relations when Senator Bob Menendez, his Israeli lobby largess second only to Biden’s, flamed out.

On July 24th Cardin sat behind Bibi during his address to a joint session of Congress, joining bought and paid for know-nothings who rose and genuflected with each lie. Good God, what kind of moral cretins have we elected?

In lockstep are billionaire bullies, Grand Inquisitors incarnate, threatening to wreck educations and careers of students with strong moral beacons many of them American Jews because their views differ from the Israeli government’s narratives. Privileged people with the influence extreme wealth conveys seeking to hamstring young people starting out. Sociopaths or psychopaths, these bullies? A wavy line.

One marvels as Biden Administration spokespersons freely shred their reputations, speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Likely auditioning for the bullies, or those who service them, credibility need not apply.

It is heartening to march in protest, to see American Jews of all ages getting along famously with Palestinians and protestors of all backgrounds. Do political chumps calling them anti-semitic realize how comical they appear?

Much of the world sees America’s claimed ideals in bizarre refraction, twisted to undermine international law and to continue carte blanche support of a violent eight-decade-long land theft underpinned by supremacist, racist beliefs. Now the world sees us as complicit, not just in slow motion ethnic cleansing, but an undeniable genocide in high gear.

A quick but-for test. Could Israel do this but for the US? The whole world knows that answer.

The British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated the real Palestinian death toll, considering those mashed under rubble and indirect deaths from destruction of medical facilities and public infrastructure, might exceed 186,000, or 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.

How does one count when two million have been displaced, their homes destroyed, with weaponry including US bombs each packing a ton of powerful explosives? Past conflicts, The Lancet‘s study noted, have had indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, so the real toll could skyrocket.

UN-backed experts recently estimated over a half-million Palestinians face imminent starvation. Ethnic cleansing is well-underway in the West Bank, from violent settlers backed by IDF and Israeli police, and children again among the targets.

The Fourth Estate is supposed to push back on such mayhem. But one example after another shows much of the mainstream compromised, finding ways to avoid reporting the full horror. Here again, the big money figures in, easily manipulating increasingly skittish journalists as journalism job prospects diminish.

The IDF confirmed there was a “death before capture” Hannibal Directive on October 7. Hear much of that, or of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, almost all without trial, kept in dire conditions, including torture, before the October 7th attack? Or that Netanyahu earlier addressed the UN while showing a map of greater Israel absent Palestinian Territories? Was Hamas, always cultivated and indirectly supported by Israel to avoid negotiating a two-state solution, baited as Israel sought an excuse to drive out Palestinians?

While the US supplies the vast majority of Israel’s weapons, Israel has itself become a major arms purveyor, its infernal creations demonstrated on unarmed civilians in Gaza.

Israel has also become a major force moving parts of the world into a surveillance state, selling technology to authoritarians around the world seeking to spy on dissidents, political opponents and journalists. One client was Saudi Arabia, using Israeli tech to spy on associates of Saudi critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before dismembering him. It’s not for nothing Israel cozies up to far right governments. They have common aims.

The more extreme those in the US Congress are, the more Israel seeks them out. AIPAC backed scores of Republican Congressmen and candidates who opposed certifying the 2020 Presidential Election. Yet that lobby isn’t required to register as a foreign agent. Why no foreign influence alarms from agencies tasked with government integrity?

As a guest of Israel in 1999, I broke bread with Moshe Katsav, Netanyahu’s outgoing Minister of Tourism. Katsav told me Palestinians are their “N-words,” sneering at the actual word. He later became President of Israel. One top Israeli official after another has expressed supremacist viewpoints, using terms like cancers and cockroaches, denigrating Palestinians, making them “the other,” as relentless as propaganda penned by Goebbels.

Any persons of color in Congress-looking at you Hakeem Jeffries, one of the largest recipients of Israeli lobby largess-taking money while ignoring galloping racism aren’t worth their salt.

If this entire essay were an abbreviated list, it would only scratch the surface. No matter how damped down the full picture is in the mainstream media, no matter how many Palestinian journalists Israel slaughters to stop those bearing witness to atrocities, no matter how many UN employees and their family members are murdered-over 366-the depravities escape Israel’s grasp.

Israel does its damnedest to pull America into the abyss as its protector, one with nothing to lose by staying the hellish course. But the US has everything to lose as it earns pariah status in the eyes of much of the world.

With permission from Capitol Hill Citizen, CapitolHillCitizen.com

The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of TravelingBoy.com